by In the past decade, the landscape of qualitative research has undergone a major shift with the evolving technologies that offer broader and easily accessible data that companies can utilize for generating actionable insights. In today’s socially active world, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest provide market researchers a quick access to several research opportunities. Social media has become one of the vital tools for qual researchers that provide quick and meaningful insights at a low cost. Despite the emergence of social media provides numerous opportunities to generate insights, the qualitative researchers have not fully leveraged the power of social media.
Social Media for Qualitative Research
Track Latest Industry Trends for Real-time Insights
Most of the social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, offer different ways to analyze the latest trends that are affecting your industry. You can follow relevant buzzwords, products, competitors or anything else that might help you find out where the market is heading. By doing this, you can easily gain insight into emerging trends and see what customers or prospects are talking about in real-time. You can follow specific hashtags to receive instant notifications when your target audience or competitor use those terms.
Easy & Quick Research
Traditional market research methods like surveys, focus groups etc. may take months to plan, form and execute. However, with social media, you can easily conduct a result in a few minutes or hours. Be it product launch or a follow-up marketing plan, you can quickly analyze each aspect of your plan independently for improved results.
Mobile and Social Go Hand-in-Hand
Social and mobile use go hand-in-hand. As per Marketing Land, around 80% of all social media use occurs on mobile devices. This is another area where qualitative researchers need to pay attention. Mobile apps combined with social media makes it easier, quicker and cheaper for organizations to collect qualitative research data from their target demographics. If customers are already engaged with brands on social media channels, then it is not hard for them to have their customers complete an online survey by offering some giveaways or free coupons or gift cards.
One of the major drawbacks of in-person research is the lack of honest responses by respondents as they feel reluctant to share their opinions freely. On the other hand, a study by Cornell professor Jeff Hancock has shown that people are more honest when communicating online. This is because they don’t meet anyone in-person and don’t feel the pressure of respecting the researcher’s feelings. In fact, they can share their honest opinion as per their comfort from home or office or anywhere else.
Social Media is perfect to understand the Behavior of Millennial and Gen Z
Be it positive or negative feedback, customers (especially Millenials and Gen Z category customers) prefer to connect with brands directly on the social media platforms over any other medium. In fact, around 82% millennial use social media to interact with brands.
Are You Ready to Learn More?
If you are interested in learning more on the use of social media in qualitative research, then do not miss our upcoming QUAL360 conference which will be held in Singapore on October 10-11. Join Naoki Takahashi, Expert Leader Corporate Market Intelligence Division at Nissan Motor Co at QUAL360 APAC 2018 as he will be revealing how to adopt social media channels as a great source of consumer insights. In addition to this, he will also be discussing the core role of qual in market research. Don’t miss this! Reserve your seat now.
